With a review pending in the Maryville, Mo., rape case, of Daisy Coleman, the second victim has come forward with her side of the story. Paige Parkhurst was 13 when she and Daisy, then 14, sneaked out of Daisy's home to meet two boys in 2012. Both girls, she says, were "intoxicated before we left the house." The foursome drove to Matthew Barnett’s house, and Paige tells al-Jazeera America that the boys "separated us as soon as we got there." One boy took Paige into a room and raped her, "after me telling him no, pushing him away," she says. "And after he was done, we sat and waited until Matt was done with Daisy." She found her friend in another room, incoherent. "She couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, and just was talking like a baby pretty much," after the boys had given her "drink after drink after drink."
Worried they'd wake Daisy's brothers in dropping her off, Paige says the boys "carried her to the back corner of her house and left her there. And they told me to go inside, that all she needed to do was to sober up, and that she would be OK, and they were gonna be there and watch her." As to why charges in the case were later dropped, Paige said investigators "were really blaming us for it." So were others in the small town who called the girls "liars," and said "all we wanted to do was get people in trouble for something that was our mistake." "It is one of the worst feelings in the world... to not understand why people wouldn't listen to your side of the story," Paige says, though she adds, "now that we do have a lot of support and we do have people listening, it’s like a miracle." Click for her full account. (More Maryville, Mo. stories.)
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